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Music happens King Vitamin mixes paints with electronica
Staff Writer, The Prague Post March 2, 2005 Experimental music fans who catch Monday's free show at Roxy will get more than an earful of strange noises, funky beats and distorted vocals. But they will still only see half of the creative output from King Vitamin, a.k.a. Jeremiah Palecek. In his Prague 1 apartment, Palecek is surrounded on one side by musical equipment: electric and acoustic guitars, effects pedals and mixers. The other side of the room is covered with oil paint and canvases. "I'd say it's almost exactly 50-50," Palecek says, looking around. Like his computer-composed music, Palecek's paintings bear the influence of high technology. One painting — of a police officer making an arrest — contains pixellated faces, rendered unidentifiable as if for a television broadcast. He has painted the portrait of a video-game character; another canvas shows a satellite image of Earth. Then there is the blue field covered with several red dots. "That's a biometric portrait of Saddam Hussein that I made back when we didn't know where he was," Palecek says. Raised in North Dakota, the 27-year-old artist has been making the music-art split for years, earning a BfA in both sound and painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Even his familial influences contribute to both sides of his work: His grandmother is a painter and sculptor; his father, a classical radio DJ.
"[My father] has a huge collection of experimental and early electronic music — John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Stockhausen," Palecek says. For King Vitamin, Palecek's work is halfway between hip-hop and folk, with a booster shot of electronic and industrial sounds. Peaches is an obvious comparison — and influence, Palecek acknowledges, along with alternative hip-hop act Hawnay Troof and geek-rockers Ween. ("Blending gangsta rap, folk music, experimental noise and boy-band exploitation" is how Palecek's Web site describes his music.) His songs are composed on a laptop computer using loops and samples, over which he adds live lyrics. Onstage, he often accompanies himself on the guitar, using an unpolished technique that gives his performance a punkish, DIY aesthetic. Some of his samples stem from unusual sources. On a workbench are three toy guitars and children's playthings that Palecek has opened up and rewired. "Basically you're short-circuiting it," he says. "You can play it and it makes weird hissing noises, screaming noises." Such sounds are high-tech and random, but random high-tech that has been subverted and controlled. The creative split between order and chaos — the Apollonian versus the Dionysian — is yet another dichotomy in Palecek's work. "Like a lot of my creations, I don't think about what I'm doing very much," he says. "With painting, definitely — it's planned out. But with music, it just happens." Evan Rail can be reached at erail@praguepost.com
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